The GOP’s latest male-foot-in-male-mouth nominee is Franks, a congressman from Arizona, who said during a committee hearing that the incidences of pregnancy from rape are “very low.” That was Franks’ way of arguing against a Democratic amendment to his bill banning abortions after 20 weeks.

The amendment before the House Judiciary Committee would have made exceptions in cases of incest and rape.

Franks’ comments were reminiscent of those made in 2012 by U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., who said women’s bodies have a way of avoiding pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape” and of those made by Richard Mourdock, a GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana who said that if a woman became pregnant as a result of rape, it was “something God intended.”

After any major crime or tragedy, people inevitably look for ways to prevent the next one like it. And that’s good. Still, in the aftermath of the Aurora shootings, let’s hope movie theaters aren’t turned into bastions of security – at least not in the long run.

In the short term, of course, extra security is both understandable and prudent.

“If not for popcorn, they would all be out of business,” Brown quotes Howard Levinson, a security consultant in Massachusetts who has worked with movie theaters, as saying. “They make all of their money from concessions, and it’s not the lucrative business it was before. It would be almost economically impossible to have a higher security standard. Without the general public paying as much as 50 percent more for a ticket, I don’t see how a theater could stay open.”

Fifty percent more per ticket to deter a crime that is no more of a threat to any single individual than, say, a lightning strike? Even a public somewhat rattled by last week’s event would surely spurn that offer.

So Elizabeth Warren might be 1/32nd Cherokee after all, thus somewhat dampening the awkward revelation that the Harvard law professor and Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts has listed herself as a minority professor since at least 1986.

Still, the discovery of a great-great-great-grandmother does raise the question of when it becomes unseemly, if not outright deceptive, for someone to claim minority status – especially in a profession where ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions are routinely observed.

Let’s stipulate from the outset that claiming minority status when you have no credible basis for it, as former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill did for decades, is sleazy and immoral. But does a heritage of 1/32nd pass the smell test, either?

Here in Colorado, former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who was three-eighths Northern Cheyenne, proudly touted his Indian ancestry during his tenure in Congress — and was repeatedly identified as the only American Indian serving there. Three-eighths isn’t a lot — Campbell was more Portuguese than Indian – but it’s meaningful.

But 1/32nd? Anyone who self-identifies as a Native American based upon such negligible ancestry is pathetically desperate for minority status – for any number of reasons. Perhaps she yearns for some sort of “authenticity” that she imagines being considered an Indian will confer.

Maybe she thinks people will look on her differently. Maybe she is ashamed of the rest of her ancestry, or wants her colleagues to think she had more to overcome in life than she probably had.

Or maybe, just maybe, she thinks – or in Warren’s case, thought – claiming to be an Indian would be a good career move.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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